I found it hard to believe at first too! Anyhow, Google and Yahoo both offer a local listing or directory for businesses, and the best part, its absolutely free! When you create a listing on Google and Yahoo Local, they have all your needs in mind. It will allow you practically create profile about your business, all the way down to hours of operation and payments you accept. The listing or profile that you create will also give you a listing in their map service - if you put in an address of course. This a very useful and critical for small businesses with little to no start up capital. Your profile will also be crawled by search engines, giving you more impressions on the search engine results. Check out the link below for a tutorial on how to set up your profile on Google Local and Google Maps!
Set up your Google Local listing!
Enjoy!